A US federal court has denied a TCPA plaintiff’s motion for attorney’s fees and two separate sanctions motions, despite having previously granted a motion to compel discovery.
The case, Wilson v. MAH Group, Inc., was decided on July 8, 2026, by the United States District Court for the District of Oregon.
MAH Group, Inc., doing business as WolfPak, faced allegations that it unlawfully initiated telemarketing calls and text messages in violation of the Telephone Consumer Protection Act.
Plaintiff Chet Michael Wilson filed a putative class action against the company, which denied the allegations and asserted that Wilson had consented to receive the text messages in question.
The discovery process became highly unusual after the defendant’s original pro hac vice attorney requested at least seven extensions before finally responding on September 19, 2025, with no substantive answers.
The attorney later admitted in emails to the Court that he, not his client, was responsible for the overdue responses, promising delivery by mid-October, a deadline he never met.
After the plaintiff moved to compel in October 2025 and the Court granted that motion in December 2025, the attorney had not been heard from by anyone since October 2025.
The defendant’s CEO, who had known the attorney professionally for years, described the silence as completely “out of character” and expressed fear that “something terrible had happened to him.”
The CEO did not learn that the motion to compel had been granted until December 31, 2025, when local counsel alerted him to the looming compliance deadline.
New counsel was retained on January 15, 2026, and the defendant produced amended responses and a substantial document production by the January 30, 2026 deadline, with defence counsel responding to new plaintiff objections within four hours in mid-February.
The plaintiff sought $8,125 in fees for 10.83 hours spent preparing the motion to compel, plus $5,850 for 7.8 hours spent preparing the fee motion itself, all billed at a $750 hourly rate.
The Court found this was a rare case where the client had been left entirely in the dark about its own discovery obligations through no fault of its own.
Because it remained unknown what had happened to the vanished attorney, the Court could not determine whether his noncompliance was substantially justified, and denied the fee motion with leave to renew if further information emerged.
The plaintiff also sought coercive sanctions of $300 per day from February 1, 2026, over the defendant’s alleged failure to produce class-wide telemarketing data held by former vendor Yotpo.
The Court rejected this request, noting that new defence counsel had roughly two weeks after being retained to coordinate with third-party vendors and still met the January 30 deadline.
A second sanctions motion sought $4,122.50 in fees plus the same daily sanction, or alternatively an order precluding the defendant from relying on any Yotpo evidence of the plaintiff’s consent.
The Court rejected the argument that because the defendant had obtained some records from Yotpo, it must therefore control all of Yotpo’s records, calling the logic insufficient under Ninth Circuit standards.
Yotpo’s legal counsel submitted a letter stating that Yotpo does not use an automatic telephone dialing system, raising what the Court called significant questions about whether the messages are governed by the TCPA at all.
The Court also granted the defendant’s motion to terminate the pro hac vice appearance of the missing attorney, who under local rules had ceased to act in the matter.
The decision serves as a notable reminder that Rule 37 fee-shifting is not automatic even after a motion to compel is granted, and that courts retain discretion where a client was genuinely blindsided by its own counsel’s conduct.